Making Poets Serve The Established Order - Editing For Content in Sophocles, Virgil, and Gilbert - Frederick Ahl

Making Poets Serve the Established Order: Editing for
Content in Sophocles, Virgil, and W. S. Gilbert
Frederick Ahl
Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, Volume 10,
Number 2, June 2012, pp. 271-301 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2012.0019
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/479768
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Making Poets Serve the Established Order: Editing for Content in

Sophocles, Virgil, and W. S. Gilbert
Frederick Ahl
Cornell University
“Pray what authors should she read, who in Classics would succeed?” a female
student asks Lady Psyche, Director of Studies at an imaginary women’s uni-
* Some sections of this article are based on work previously published in my Two Faces
of Oedipus (2008). All citations of Gilbert’s libretti are from Allen 1975b.
Partial Answers 10/2: 271–301 © 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press
272 Partial Answers
versity, in Act 1 of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Princess Ida (Allen: 218). In real-life
colleges for upper class young women in the late nineteenth century, Classics
was the heart of the curriculum as it had long been in colleges for upper-class
young men. The goal, Gilbert’s student realizes, is not a literary understand-
ing of the authors read but success in an academic discipline that had evolved,
over centuries, within the context of a Christian intellectual tradition. “Classics”
designated only (but not all) ancient Greek and Latin authors of (ironically) the
pre-Christian centuries. Few “classical” authors were taught in their entirety. Se-
lected excerpts illustrated approved ways of thinking and writing and presented
approved topics in approved ways. Texts were a means to an end, not ends in
themselves, in the training future members of the ruling class.
Many among Gilbert’s audience, who, like himself, had been educated in the
Classics, might have expected Lady Psyche to name, in reply, “serious” writers
commonly read at schools: Cicero and Demosthenes, Virgil and Homer. But
Psyche selects Anacreon, Ovid, Aristophanes, and Juvenal, in an order progress-
ing from risqué love lyric and sexual allusion to crudely explicit sexual satire,
most notoriously of women. In the prudish world of Victorian England, her re-
sponse would prompt gasps as well as laughter. For although these authors are
among those considered classical, teaching them to young women in a Victorian
classroom would have been problematic. So Lady Psyche adds: “if you’re well
advised, you will get them bowdlerised” (218). Dr. Thomas Bowdler, famous for
his campaign to purge texts of elements he considered offensive, had become
synonymous with sexual censorship (see Perrin). Success in classics is achieved,
Lady Psyche suggests, by reading appropriately censored texts in appropriately
prescribed ways.
To this very day texts are not only bowdlerized to fit the moral agenda of ed-
ucators but also otherwise altered to fit the ideological and political agenda of a
society or to suit the whim of a director. Nowadays they are “edited for content,”
to borrow an ambiguous term from American television. Such editing not only
removes what censors disapprove of, but also adds material and even changes
stories for reasons that are commercial as often as moral or political. Alexandre
Dumas’ Edmond Dantes is made to forgive and marry his old sweetheart from
the days before his imprisonment in almost every film and television adaptation
of The Count of Monte Cristo (1844).1 And in Bernhard Wicki’s international
film version of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s masterpiece, Besuch der alten Dame
(1956), re-titled The Visit (1964), Claire Zachanasian (renamed Karla) forgives
and marries her faithless lover, Alfred Ill (renamed Serge Miller), instead of hav-
ing him killed, as she does in Dürrenmatt’s play.2 In theater, movies, and televi-
1
As, for example, in Lee’s 1934 and Kevin Reynolds’ 2002 film versions and even the
generally more accurate 1998 French television miniseries directed by Josée Payan.
2
Wicki also obliterates the grotesqueness of Dürrenmatt’s Claire with all her artificial
appendages, by casting the young and winsome Ingrid Bergman in the role.
sion, producers and directors may re-work their original more or less at will if it
is out of copyright. The same also happens in translations, as we shall see later.
A glance at Dumas’ or Dürrenmatt’s original shows moviegoers how the
authors actually ended their works. And nineteenth or twentieth century stu-
dents could easily discover what Aristophanes or Juvenal actually wrote, since
those who bowdlerized sexual or other discourse of the body usually noted their
omissions and prided themselves on their alterations. In the English-speaking
world, anyone wanting to identify the suppressed saltier poems of the Roman
epigrammatist Martial could get the bi-lingual Loeb text (Martial 1919) where
“offending” epigrams are printed in Giuspanio Graglia’s 1782 and 1791 Italian
prose translations rather than in English. Ironically, Graglia published his Italian
versions in England to avoid scandal in Italy.
Yet W. S. Gilbert has fared worse at the hands of moralizing scholars than
either Aristophanes or Juvenal whose obscenity is so overt and thoroughly noted
by commentators from antiquity onwards that it cannot be denied. Unlike his
ancient predecessors, Gilbert was not free to be overtly salty. Neither his produc-
ers nor his audience would have countenanced it. Indeed, his sexual allusions are
sufficiently oblique for readers who do not wish to acknowledge them simply
to ignore them. In Act I of Princess Ida, Lady Blanche expels Sacharissa from
the women’s university because she “dared to bring a set of chessmen here.”
Sacharissa responds in tears:
Sacharissa:I meant no harm; they’re only men of wood!
Blanche:They’re men with whom you give each other mate. And that’s
enough! (231)
The jest on “mating” as checkmating in chess and “mating” as sexual copulation
works on a level that allowed Victorians to laugh safely in public. Reaction to
further and more perverse resonances of Blanche’s statement about the girls’ in-
teractions could be subsumed in the laughter about the pun, or rationalized away.
Because there is one obvious level to the joke, the author is protected against
the fury of those who detect secondary levels, knowing that no one would dare
accuse him of intending them. He could simply deny such intent, leaving his ac-
cuser, rather than himself, looking like the moral degenerate.
Other Gilbertian double-entendres are no less sexually risqué. In Iolanthe
(1882), the shepherd Strephon, worried about the attention the House of Lords is
paying his beloved Phyllis, is unconvinced by her protestations of innocence and
asks two questions which would have raised the eyebrows of anyone familiar
with the poetry of Catullus and the Earl of Rochester:
“Why did five and twenty Liberal Peers come down to shoot over your
grassy plot last autumn? It couldn’t have been the sparrows. Why did five-
and-twenty Conservative Peers come down to fish your pond?” (183).
274 Partial Answers
Although Gilbert is more daring than most of his English contemporaries, he

usually treats sexuality cautiously. Like his critic George Bernard Shaw, he had
to face the dramatist’s predicament of being “forced to deal almost exclusively
with cases of sexual attraction and yet forbidden to exhibit the incidents of that
attraction or even to discuss its nature” (Shaw I: 495). Comedy and melodrama
flirt with forbidden behavior, only to save the situation at the last moment. But
Gilbert often takes the opposite approach, threatening social chaos at the end not
at the outset.
I include Gilbert, by far the most widely performed English theatrical writer
from the nineteenth century, even though the literary and academic establish-
ments have little use for him, not just because I admire his work but because
he is a master of a manner of writing I have come to call the associative style:
a way of establishing all detectable connections among ideas at all levels, often
with great and paradoxical intricacy. He writes the way Sophocles, Virgil, or
Ovid writes. Some modern critical methods, in contrast, tend to be dissociative;
that is to say they assume that unless explicit markers are present, one should
not assume a complex intricacy of design. Larry Benson, for instance, declared
that certain puns in Chaucer are the product of the reader’s prurient imagination
rather than part of the poet’s design.3 Similarly, teachers sometimes still insist
that Ovid’s more risqué allusions are unintended. 4
The default assumption of dissociative reasoning — that what is not explicit
is probably not being said — damages our understanding of many works of lit-
erature. Works that become set books in academic curricula are often reduced to
little packages of meaning or catechisms and then taught much as religious texts
are taught, and for much the same reason. Modern European and Middle East-
ern education, even when secularized, has deep roots in monotheistic traditions
and dogma. In those traditions, orthodoxy, “correct belief,” is prized and heresy
(from Greek haíresis, “choosing for oneself”) punished. The goal was a common
cultural background for the young, to program them with the information and
ideology embraced by those in power; “classic” works become documents to il-
lustrate the notions they wanted to impart. By contrast, the less useful educators
made texts for their ideological purposes, the freer we are to see them explode
into a fascinatingly new and polyphonic life.
Maurice Bowra pointed out that many people “dislike the notion that poetry
can have any connection with politics” and that, in their view, the influence of
politics in poetry “defiles an otherwise pure art” (Bowra: 1). He was thinking
3
“In all charity we must tolerate the punsters as best we can. Let us not deny them their
private pleasures” (Benson 47).
4
Ovid’s extensive use of puns and other forms of wordplay destabilizes and pluralizes
meaning and allows innuendo and sexual double-entendre on a much grander scale than most
other poets; see Ahl 1985.
primarily of English attitudes, which hold that poetry is, ideally, sincere, in-
tensely personal, not overly formal in meter, diction, or syntax, and definitely
not learned. Our sense that political poets as not fully poetical may explain, in
part, our desire to reduce and simplify poetical works with complex resonances
when we translate them into English. Since double-entendre undermines sincer-
ity, scholars prefer not to recognize its presence unless it is so blatant that it no
longer qualifies as double. But double entendre is critical to humor and to writ-
ing in periods of censorship.
Since sexual innuendo on the English stage in Gilbert’s day had to be so
oblique that critics who pointed it out risked being charged themselves with
over-interpretation and dirty-mindedness, a critical stalemate resulted. Poets
find freedom to use sexual double-entendre when society restricts such usage,
because the very presence of restrictions “reassures” the public that any of-
fensive undertones detected are unintentional. Unfortunately, that reassurance
also encourages literalist interpreters. Insistence that double-entendre must be
explicit if it is to be taken into account has created a tradition of representing
Gilbert as the epitome of the ideas he spent his life satirizing. Indeed, Gilbert’s
work has been subject to something rather different from bowdlerization: it has
been represented as proclaiming ideas and ideals Gilbert himself either ridicules
or excludes from his libretti. The same doom has long since befallen Sophocles
and Virgil, as we shall see. But let us begin with Gilbert.
1. Dissociative Misreadings
In his introduction to the Oxford edition of Gilbert’s libretti, Lord David Cecil
comments:
Respectable and domestic Victorians of this time were also prudish. So
are the Savoy Operas. Gilbert made it a rule that no man or woman should
appear in the costume of the other sex; Sullivan never allowed the volup-
tuous rhythms of the waltz to defile his chaste scores. In all this the Savoy
Operas stand out in sharp contrast to their counterparts across the Channel,
Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène and La Vie Parisienne, sinfully aglitter with
sex and the can-can. . . . In them we see Victorian England out to show that
she could produce an entertainment just as clever and bright and amusing
as anything but with nothing in it — to quote Mr. Podsnap — “that could
bring a blush to the cheek of the young person.” (xi)
Cecil’s observations are flatly contradicted in Gilbert’s surviving plays, short
stories, and libretti, and in Sullivan’s operatic scores. In Gilbert’s, Happy Arca-
dia (1872), characters who have switched roles across sexual lines are plunged
into identity crises. “If I,” one character observes, “who was Daphne, am now
Strephon, the question arises, who is the person who is now Daphne?” (1969:
276 Partial Answers
191). And in Gilbert’s melodrama A Sensation Novel (1871), the characters at-
tempt to discover (and thwart) the author’s plans for them in a plot that antici-
pates Luigi Pirandello’s 1921 Six Characters in Search of an Author. Gripper,
the detective protagonist, deduces that the author will reveal him as the villain’s
long-lost granddaughter:
Gripper: I’ve been a man all my life and I protest against be changed into
a woman at my time of life.
Author: But you’ll be a very fine woman!
Gripper: I’d rather be a very fine man. (1969: 157—58)
And in Act 1 of Princess Ida (1884), Hilarion, Cyril, and Florian dress as women
to enter the Women’s University.5 When they are detected and captured, Princess
Ida refuses mercy because they are, she says, “men in women’s clothes!” (228).
There is no more substance to Cecil’s claim that Sullivan avoided waltzes:
Gianetta and Tessa’s duet “Thank you, gallant gondolieri” in Act 1 of Gondo-
liers (1889), for instance, is marked tempo di Valzer in the score, and Ludwig’s
opening duet with Lisa in the Grand Duke (1896), is marked tempo di Valse. Nor
will the contrast with Offenbach and the can-can hold: the wild dance, the alle-
gro vivace e con fuoco, that greets the Prince of Monte-Carlo and his entourage
in Act 2 of the Grand Duke (Chappell Score number 26), actually is a can-can.
To top things off, the decadence of Sullivan’s Offenbachian dance is followed in
The Grand Duke by the Prince of Monte Carlo’s roulette song in praise of gam-
bling, complete with a refrain in French. Cecil’s misrepresentation of Gilbert
and Sullivan exemplifies the powerful impetus among scholars and readers to
co-opt writers as spokesmen for their society’s collective ideals and agenda —
the failure of Gilbert and Sullivan’s own words and musical notations to support
Cecil’s claims is no obstacle to his agenda.
The tendency of the dissociative method to privilege some parts of a text
at the expense of others, or to enforce a non text-based interpretation which
leaves the impression that a great artist is unintentionally (i.e. incompetently)
contradicting himself leads to further distortions. In Sophocles’ Oedipus (758–
62), Jocasta implies that a man summoned as the allegedly sole surviving wit-
ness to the death of Laius saw Oedipus as ruler of Thebes before he realized
Laius was dead. If her report is correct, the man cannot have witnessed Laius’
death. This raises problems for the usual assumptions about Oedipus: namely,
that Oedipus discovers that he has killed Laius and that Laius was his father.
For Jocasta’s words suggest a more complex sequence of events. Roger Dawe
reacts angrily: “There are no other places [in Greek tragedy] where temporal
relativity receives such arbitrary treatment. More serious perhaps than the of-
fence against real life logic is the offence against dramatic likelihood” (160).
5
Princess Ida has a prologue, a first act, and a second act, but editors often re-designate
them Acts 1, 2, and 3. In some editions, then, Act 1 is labeled Act 2.
Dawe chastises Sophocles for being at odds with our cultural sense of what
the drama is about. Instead of concluding that one should re-examine one’s as-
sumptions about the play, Dawe concludes that Sophocles has made a mistake.
Yet Sophocles’ Jocasta could be right: the alleged witness, when interrogated, is
never asked whether he saw Laius killed, let alone whether he saw Oedipus kill
Laius. Dawe reads Sophocles dissociatively, rejecting as Sophoclean blunders
all elements that contradict his (canonical) interpretation of Oedipus, instead of
taking conflicting testimony as a given and interpreting the play on this basis.
He exemplifies an approach which continues to govern our understanding of the
classical literary canon.
The consequences of such dissociative reading can, however, be illustrated
less controversially from the productions of and scholarship on Gilbert and Sul-
livan’s operas, notably Pirates of Penzance (1880) than from Sophocles because
there is less cultural investment in what Gilbert and Sullivan “intended.” They
have yet to become part of academia’s musical, literary, or theatrical canon.
The opening scene of Pirates of Penzance is the celebration, by a chorus of
sherry-drinking pirates, of the twenty-first birthday of their apprentice. Fred-
eric, we learn, was indentured legally to the (illegal) “trade” of piracy by his
nursemaid, Ruth, who confused the words “pirate” and “pilot,” she claims, and
apprenticed him to a pirate by mistake. When the Pirate King asks what his in-
tentions are now he is free, Frederic vows to devote himself to the extermination
of his former comrades. He also says he will leave behind his nurse-maid Ruth,
the only woman he has ever seen, who is twenty-six years his senior and has an
amorous interest in him.6
Frederic does not, however, escape the pirates so easily. The Pirate King and
Ruth produce a document that, they claim, shows Frederic is not free of his in-
dentures after all: he was born in a leap-year on the 29th of February and will not
reach his twenty-first birthday until 1940 (128). Scholars duly speculate about
what leap-year Frederic must have been born in. This mathematical problem
needs investigation only if we assume, as most commentators and stage direc-
tors do, that the Pirate King and Ruth are telling Frederic the truth. The usual
conclusion, therefore, is that Pirates must be set during the winter, on or around
Frederic’s alleged birthday, which, for a leap-year baby, is usually celebrated on
February 28. The problem is that all internal references suggest the action is oc-
curring during the English summer.7 A chorus of women sings that it is passing
by a river “swollen with the summer rain” and through “long and leafy mazes,
threaded with unnumbered daisies” (117). They even want to take their shoes
and stockings off to paddle in the sea — which none but the toughest would do
in winter. The weather they talk about is that of June: “How beautifully blue the
sky, the glass is rising very high . . . we shall have a warm July” (119).
6
Frederic will, of course, be “ruthless” as a result.
7
Bradley is well aware of this (see 190).
278 Partial Answers
Surely the Pirate King and Ruth have trespassed on Frederic’s own credulous
simplicity in suggesting he was born on February 29. They have also duped
most critics and directors, who see the conflicting details as evidence of faulty,
rather than of subtle, design. Interpretations of Pirates of Penzance, then, have
something in common with those of Sophocles’ Oedipus: when presented with
contradictory hearsay and vague reports commentators draw analogous unsup-
ported conclusions.
2. Tailoring Oedipus to Freud

In 1933, the year Hitler came to power, E. M. Butler began a very influential
book entitled The Tyranny of Greece over Germany. Although she offers many
insights into German and, less frequently, Austrian literature, her title is disturb-
ing because it holds ancient Greece to account for what German writers did with
Greek art, thought, and poetry. The tyranny was, rather, that of German schol-
arship, music, and literature over our understanding of Greek art, thought, and
poetry; it shaped much of the modern perception of Classical literature. Butler’s
own conclusion is that the Germans “wished to seize and possess Greek beauty
and make it their own; or to outdo it; or to drag it violently into the present; to
unearth the buried treasure; to resuscitate the gods” (335).
Our present understanding of Sophocles’ Oedipus was developed during the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries when it became “perhaps the pre-eminent
classical text in the Western tradition” (Rudnytsky 337). While its pre-eminence
owes much to the theatre, its supremacy was secured when the Austrian Sig-
mund Freud used his notion of Sophocles’ Oedipus as a symbol of the repressed
incestuous relationship between son and mother and of the son’s repressed de-
sire to kill his father (see also Ahl 2008: 22–30). It was the more Classicizing
than Romantic reading of Sophocles’ Oedipus, as translated by J. C. C. Donner
and as modified by Freud, rather than the play itself, that became the privileged
text. Freud, significantly, as we shall see later, makes no reference to, and prob-
ably did not use, Hölderlin’s justly famous 1804 translation of Oedipus, but he
did use Donner’s much later translation in which he left marginal markings on
page 48.8 Freud’s summary of the myth, reflecting Donner’s reading, remains the
basis for most discussions today:
You all know the Greek legend of King Oedipus, who was destined by fate
to kill his father and take his mother to wife, who did everything possible
to escape the oracle’s decree and punished himself by blinding when he
learned that he had none the less unwittingly committed both these crimes.
I hope many of you may yourselves have felt the shattering effect of the
8
Freud’s library edition of Hölderlin is that of 1909-11.
tragedy in which Sophocles has treated the story. The work of the Athe-
nian dramatist exhibits the way in which the long-past deed of Oedipus is
gradually brought to light by an investigation ingeniously protracted and
fanned into life by ever fresh relays of evidence. (Freud 1966: 330; my
italics)
Freud is advancing a theory of primal urges innate to the human condition and
over which the individual has no control. But what he offers as a summary of
Sophocles’ Oedipus has little basis in Sophocles. It is, rather, a summary charged
with the Roman terminology of fate we find in Seneca’s Latin Oedipus. When
Peter Rudnytsky argues that, “until approximately the 1790s, admiration for
Sophocles’ Oedipus the King was almost always contaminated by extraneous
features, above all the baleful example of Seneca,” he is wrong. “Only when
German Romantic writers and philosophers,” he continues, “following the lead
of Lessing, were able to clear away neoclassical and Senecan excrescences, and
behold Sophocles’ drama afresh as a tragedy of self‑knowledge, do we enter
the age of Oedipus that reaches its apogee in Freud” (97; cf. 108–109).9 Wrong
again.
Nineteenth century German critics, in fact, continued to read Sophocles’ Oe-
dipus in the light of Roman determinism. That is why I have italicized certain
words in the citation from Freud: the Latin notion “fate,” had, by Freud’s day,
been subsumed and intensified not only by Calvinistic Protestant theologians,
but also by mechanistic positivists, in their notions of causal determinism.10 Cal-
vin placed the individual in an even more rigidly pre-ordained world order than
did the apostles of determinism at Rome, the Stoics, by whom they were much
influenced. Here is what the chorus says about fate in Seneca’s Oedipus:
Destiny herds us on. Do not fight destiny.
Anxiety and fretfulness cannot alter
9
For the influence of Senecan drama in the Renaissance, see Braden 1978 and1985.
10
In Sophocles’ Oedipus no Greek word can properly be translated “fate” or “desti-
ny” as we understand these terms. The closest approximation is moira, (“portion of life,”
“doom,” “death”), used once by Jocasta in 713, in reference to the portion or lot that the
oracle said would be Laius’ if he had a child, and in an attempt to contend that this lot was
never achieved. A specific but avoidable doom is not quite what determinists have in mind.
But the word tyché, “chance,” in the sense of coincidence, which has no place in Calvinism
or Stoicism, occurs frequently in Oedipus. To Stoics there was no such thing as coincidence
or chance: they saw chance as a kind of short-hand for non-evident causality: their operative
word for what we call “fate” was heimarméne (“the spun thread of destiny”) in Greek and
fatum, from which our word “fate” derives, in Latin. Fate (or destiny) is a part of Seneca’s
vocabulary, not Sophocles’. And fatum, in Latin, is less absolute than “fate” in English. It
derives from fari, “to speak.” Its force is similar to the biblical formula “it is written.” Fatum
is often, in Latin poetry, the spoken word of Jupiter; but Jupiter’s word is often disputed by
other gods. See Ahl 2007: 419–20.
280 Partial Answers
the spun threads by which we hang.

All we endure, we mortals marked for death,
all that we do comes from above.
Lachesis keeps guard on her spindle’s downward spinning law
which no hand can rewind.
Everything moves down a preset path:
the last day is determined by the first.
Our individual thread runs its straight path
woven in its causal tapestry.
No god can make it swerve, no prayer can shift
what has been planned for each of us.
Many, indeed, are ruined by their fear.
Many achieve their destiny while and because
they fear what destiny may have in store. (ll. 979—99)11
Freud gives everything a more than Senecan deterministic spin in his summary.
He even describes Greek oracles, which yield ambiguous forecasts, as “making
decrees.” Most paradoxically, his summary suggests that Sophocles’ Oedipus is
an exception to the universality of the very complex Freud names for him. Freud
allows Oedipus no unconscious inner longing to commit the crimes he comes to
believe he has committed, as both Sophocles and Seneca do in their tragedies.
Had Freud contended that Sophocles’ Oedipus was an exemplar of the Oedi-
pus complex, he would have embroiled himself in a battle with Classical schol-
ars, who were working hard to demonstrate that Sophocles was a pious man,
Oedipus a pious hero, and Oedipus a pious play — thereby making Aristotle’s
favorite tragedy acceptable as a school text. There were, of course, no dirty
words or phrases in Sophocles as there were in Aristophanes and Juvenal. But a
hero with subconscious desires to kill his father and marry his mother needed a
little make-over for classrooms in the early twentieth century.
There is, therefore, a strong strain in scholarship that insists on Oedipus’
logical reasoning, fundamental goodness, innocence, and lack of criminality: he
killed his father and married his mother without knowing that they were his fa-
ther and mother. This noble Oedipus, innocent of criminal intent, is much made
over from the Oedipus Sophocles gives us. Sophocles’ Oedipus says he came to
doubt his legitimacy because he believed an unnamed drunk at a dinner party
who called him a bastard, someone else’s child passed off on his unsuspecting
father. Despite the assurances of his father, Polybus, and his mother, Merope, he
went to Delphi. There, in response to his question about who his parents were,
the oracle told him he would kill his father and marry his mother. So he set out
for Thebes. En route, he recalls, he killed, in a fit of road rage, an entire party of
travelers including an old man at what he suspects is the same intersection where
11
Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine.
Laius died (801–13). Is Oedipus a criminal only if one of the victims was (or
might have been) his father?
When told soon after his autobiography that Polybus has died, he is delight-
ed. Since his father is dead, he can’t kill him (964–75). And he later threatens to
torture to death an old slave he thinks, fleetingly, might be his father (1162). It
does occur to him, fleetingly, that he might have caused Polybus’ death because
Polybus missed him so much during his absence (969–70). That is precisely
what Odysseus claims his mother’s ghost told him about her death (in Odyssey
11.202–203): she died because she missed Odysseus. Oedipus and Odysseus use
the same Greek word pothos to describe the pain of their parents’ yearning. And
Oedipus still declines to return to Corinth for fear of Merope, his mother, who
presumably, is still available for him to marry (976–1013).
What Freud calls “ever fresh relays of evidence” are, in Sophocles’ trag-
edy, vague and contradictory hearsay reports — all of which would have been
unacceptable as evidence in an ancient Athenian court. And the correctness of
Oedipus’s conclusion that he is the son, and killer, of Laius rests, in the context
of Sophocles’ play, on the same assumption critics make about the date of Fred-
eric’s birth in Gilbert’s Pirates of Penzance: that the “informants” are all tell-
ing the hero the truth, not lies. Each piece of so-called testimony in Sophocles’
Oedipus is contradicted by another piece; and each informant has his or her
own motives and concerns and agenda as people and dramatic characters, such
as the Pirate King and Ruth, generally do. But Sophocles’ Oedipus is routinely
discussed dissociatively, as if only Oedipus matters, as if the tragedy were not
the tale of Creon’s rise to power as well as of Oedipus’ fall from power, and as if
the only dramatic issue were the title character’s relentless concern with his own
guilt. Above all, we forget that Oedipus is a mythical, not a historical personage.
There is no single, subtending “truth” about what happens to him. Sophocles’
special twist is having the mythic Oedipus investigate that which, as a mythic
being, he does not have: a personal past. He has only the numerous and conflict-
ing narrations of himself in earlier narratives.
Translators of Sophocles into English often modify the dramatist’s original
words to make the play fit the conventional interpretation. Dawe, for example,
takes the extreme step of asserting, with a single, unsupported gloss on line
1035, that the Greek óneidos means “disfigurement” — which it never does
except in his gloss. It means “slander” or “reproach.” Sophocles’ Oedipus is ask-
ing his interlocutor why he is mentioning the old slander based upon his name
Oidipous, sometimes etymologized as “Swellfoot.” Dawe makes Oedipus ask
why his interlocutor is mentioning an actual disfigurement that caused him to
be so named.
Such textual adjustments usually involve making answers fit questions
when they do not fit in Sophocles or modifying questions to fit answers. I of-
fer two sets of examples from about two dozen in the play. French, Italian, and
Spanish translators tend to make similar modifications. These are not scholarly
282 Partial Answers
mis-translations but a deliberate re-shaping of the text. Like Freud, translators

privilege the template of their generalized sense of the myth over the specifics of
Sophocles’ text.12 Where Sophocles did not get things right, they will get things
right for him.
Here is the same simple question and its answer Oedipus 935-36 in Donner’s
German version (found in Freud’s library) and in three popular English transla-
tions:
(1) J. C. C. Donner:
Question: . . . wer sendet dich?
Answer: Korinthos. (1868: 935-36)
Exactly mirrored in English by
Robert Fagles:
(2) Question: Who sent you? Answer: Corinth. (1982: 212)
(3) Luci Berkowitz and Theodore Brunner:
Question: Where do you come from? Answer: From Corinth. (1970: 21)
(4) Peter Arnott:
Question: Who sent you here to us? Answer: I come from Corinth. (1960:
22)
(5) Hölderlin:
Question: Und von wem bist du gekommen?
And from whom have you come?
Answer: Ich komme von Korinth.
I come from Corinth. (1804: Oedipus 935-360)
Hölderlin has captured, almost exactly, the terse Greek:
Question: Parà tinòs [from whose presence] aphigménos [having ar-
rived]?
Answer: ek tes Korínthou [out of Corinth].
Sophocles’ questioner is asking a stranger from whose presence he has arrived;
the stranger replies with an answer that says where he’s (come) from.
Three translations recast part of either the question or the answer because, in
the original, the response does not answer the question asked. Donner and Fagles
sharpen “arrived from” into “sent” and ignore the emphatic change of preposi-
tions. They make the answer fit the question. Berkowitz and Brunner keep the
idea of “arrived from” but dispel all sense that the questioner is asking about a
person, not a place. They make the question fit the answer. Arnott changes “ar-
rived from” to “sent,” but makes no other adjustments. The first two versions
do not allow us to see that the Corinthian is evading the question. Donner’s and
12
For more on these issues, see Ahl 2008: 42–59.
Fagles’ modification, in fact, suggests that the stranger is an official messenger

from Corinth. In Berkowitz and Brunner, the issue of whether he is or is not a
messenger does not arise. The questioner asks only the visitor’s origin and gets
a brief, clear response. In Arnott the question is based on the assumption that the
stranger is a messenger; but the response raises doubts: the stranger names the
city he is from, not the person who has sent him.
Much hinges on this stranger’s words. He will soon be credentialed as a
messenger by his questioner, who is Jocasta, Oedipus’ wife; and he will per-
suade Oedipus of something we are generally taught to take for granted before
we read the play: that Oedipus himself is not originally from Corinth but from
Thebes. This same stranger claims first that he found Oedipus as a baby on Mt.
Cithaeron, then later that someone else gave him the child (Oedipus.1025-26).
(1) Storr:
Question: A foundling or a purchased slave, this child?
Answer: I found thee in Cithaeron’s wooded glens. (Storr I: 94)
(2) Hölderlin:
Question: Hattst du gekauft mich, gabst du mich als Vater?
Did you buy me, give me as father?
Answer: Ich fand dich in Kithärons grüner Schlucht.
I found you in Cithaeron’s green gorges.
(Hölderlin Oedipus, 1025-26)
(3) Cavander:
Question: So you gave me to . . . Had you bought me for your slave.
Where did you find me?
Answer: You were lying beneath the trees
In a glade upon Cithaeron. (Sophocles 1961: 31)
(4) Fitts and Fitzgerald:
Question: What of you? Did you buy me? Did you find me by chance?
Answer: I came upon you in the crooked pass of Kithairon. (Sophocles
1965: 50)
(5) Robert Fagles:
Question: And you, did you . . . buy me? find me by accident?
Answer: I stumbled on you, down by the woody flanks of Mount Cithaer-
on. (Sophocles 1982: 219)
(6) E. F. Watling:
Question: Was I . . . found? Or bought?
Answer: Found, in a wooded hollow of Cithaeron. (Sophocles 1947: 54)
(7) J.C.C. Donner:
Question: Du kauftest oder fandest mich und gabst mich ihm?
Did you buy me or find me and give me to him?
284 Partial Answers
Answer: In tiefer Waldschlucht am Kithairon fand ich dich.

I found you in a deep, wooded gorge on Cithaeron. (Sophocles
1868: 1025-26)
Hölderlin and Storr make the stranger claim to have found the child, personally.
But Hölderlin’s version, while keeping the verb “find” in the proper place, leaves
out the element of chance from Oedipus’ question and makes explicit what is
only implicit in Oedipus’ later remarks: the possibility that the Corinthian might
himself be his father. Donner, however, introduces “find” into the question. The
others remove “find” from the answer, and re-insert it as a prompt in Oedipus’
question; they give the stranger a less definitive response: “you were lying be-
neath,” “I came upon,” “I stumbled on,” or “found” by persons unnamed. The
Greek word in the question, translated “Did you find?” or “Was I found” in the
last four, is tychón (“you, having chanced upon”). The Greek word in the an-
swer is heurón (“I, having found”). Sophocles’ Oedipus is absolutely not asking
whether the stranger found the child himself, but whether the child came into the
stranger’s possession accidentally (by chance) or deliberately (by purchase). It
is important to keep “chance,” since Oedipus concludes, at the end of this scene,
that he is the child of chance (týche). And chance, týche, is the most often cited
causal force in the play.
The displacement of the verb “find” from the stranger’s answer to Oedipus’
question lessens our alertness to a crucial change in the stranger’s testimony a
few lines later. When questioned as to whom the child he found belonged, the
Corinthian says he does not know, but that the person who gave him the child
will know. So he did not, by his own later admission, find the child at all. If he
was not lying then, he’s lying now, or vice-versa, and possibly lying on both
occasions (as Jocasta later attempts to suggest). By transposing “find” from the
question to the answer, translators tamper with the testimony of a witness, and
encourage us to rationalize the Corinthian’s lie as a slip caused by his careless
response to a leading question they make Oedipus ask, one that Sophocles’ Oe-
dipus never asks at all. Watling’s manipulation is the most subtle, since he puts
“found” in both the question and the answer but carefully suppresses the person
of the finder.
Why do translators do this? Because, once caught in a lie, the Corinthian
loses credibility as a witness. And since his testimony is crucial to Oedipus’
conclusion that he is not the son of Polybus of Corinth but of Theban Laius,
the canonical interpretation requires that the Corinthian be telling Oedipus
the truth regardless of what Sophocles has him say. Translators therefore ad-
just Sophocles’ original to disguise or minimize the Corinthian’s lie. Publishers
and teachers want translations that support, rather than undermine, the formu-
laic catechisms most of us were taught before ever we read the play: that when
Sophocles’ Oedipus concludes he has killed his father and married his mother,
he has discovered the “truth.” They do not wish to consider that Oedipus may
have been drawn to his conclusion, as is Frederic in Pirates of Penzance, by the
evasive answers and lies of others, and by his own credulity and weakness in
cross-examination. Creon, Teiresias, and the Corinthian, no less than the Pirate
King and Ruth, have discernible personal motives for their actions and words
rather than disinterested concern for truth or for Oedipus’ well-being.
Our culture still privileges the notion of truth based on belief over the pre-
Christian notion of truth based on knowledge. The English word “truth” itself
is, after all, related to “trust,” “trow,” and “troth,” whereas the Greek alétheia
is often treated as a negative term: “that which does not elude (us).” Alétheia,
in fact, has two antonyms: tò pseudés, “the false,” and dóxa, “belief.” And from
the earliest days of the church, the concern of theologians has been orthodoxy,
“correct belief”: orthè dóxa. All else is heresy (haíresis, “choosing for oneself).13
Our training, following the Christian tradition, inclines us to believe in author-
ity when it comes to the literary written word, and to accept, as do Oedipus
and Frederic, what their fellow characters tell them without investigating their
motives. Perhaps we reason that, if Sophocles or Gilbert wanted us to believe
Creon or the Pirate King were lying, they should (and would) have told us so
explicitly.14
3. Polyphonic, “Associative” Texts: Censoring Gilbert

In Pirates of Penzance, Ruth’s confusion about “pilot” and “pirate” is not the
only key wordplay. Audiences always enjoy the heated misunderstanding be-
tween Major-General Stanley and the Pirate King based on the pun between
“orphan” and the aristocratic English pronunciation of “often,” homonymous
with “orphan.” The Pirate-King assumes the Major-General keeps saying “or-
phan” when he is, in fact, saying “often.” The Major-General’s attempted ex-
planation simply deepens the problem: “I said ‘often,’ ‘frequently,’ only once”
(122). But this wordplay opens up a much larger field of associative links. The
pirates, whose predatory activities would (if they were competent) orphan many
children, never attack a weaker party or molest an orphan. This, Frederic tells
the Pirate King, is why everyone the pirates capture now claims to be an orphan.
Word has got about. “One would think,” Frederic exclaims, “that Great Britain’s
mercantile navy was recruited solely from her orphan asylums — which we
know is not the case” (114). The sadly ironic jest underlying Frederic’s words is
that many British sailors would indeed have been orphans who ran away to sea
or were pressed into service by a navy that “could never secure enough sailors
thanks to conditions of service so primitive and brutal” (Kennedy 128).
Samuel, the Pirate King’s lieutenant, defends the pirates’ policy of clemency
towards orphans: “we are orphans ourselves, and know what it is” (Allen 1975b:
13
For ancient etymologies of alétheia, see Ahl 1985: 47 and 322 and the sources cited;
see also Ahl 1991: 85–88; and 2002: 117–32.
14
See Ahl 1988: 17–19.
286 Partial Answers
114). The pirates, however, turn out not to be orphans at all — if we believe Ruth,
Frederic’s nurse and the piratical maid-of-all-work, at the end of the operetta. She
declares the pirates “are all noblemen who have gone wrong” (134) as if being a
nobleman removed all taint of prior criminal piracy in England (as some would
contend that it did, in practice). But since aristocratic nobility is based on the as-
sumption of traceable extended families, these pirates, if they are nobles, as Ruth
claims, are unlikely to be abandoned orphans; and if abandoned orphans they are
unlikely to be aristocrats. Yet, on the basis of Ruth’s claim, the pirates are forgiven
all past misdeeds since “peers will be peers, and youth must have its fling” (134).
They are even encouraged by Major-General Stanley to resume their “legislative
duties” and to marry his surprisingly numerous daughters.15
The bafflement does not end here. At the other extreme, when the pirates
capture the Major-General’s daughters, one, Mabel, cries out in warning: “we
are Wards in Chancery, and father is a Major-General.” These two claims seem
contradictory. If the girls are daughters of a high ranking officer, why are they
Wards in Chancery? Ian Bradley notes: “Minors are normally put under the care
and guardianship of the Court of Chancery if they are orphans, or to protect
them from their parents” (112). But Bradley does not, as I think he should, al-
low for the possibility that the girls might be orphans just as surely as the pirates
are not. They are certainly numerous, and there is no mention or evidence of a
Mrs. Stanley who might be their mother. A further knot is added to this same
tangle by Major-General Stanley himself, who claims that he is an orphan — to
rescue himself and his brood from the pirates’ clutches. As in Oscar Wilde’s The
Importance of Being Ernest, an amazing number of characters in Gilbert and
Sullivan either seem not to have, or, like Bunthorne in Patience (1881), claim
not to have, a mother.
In a spasm of apparent remorse as Act 2 opens, the Major-General confesses
to Frederic in the cemetery outside his family chapel that he is not now (and nev-
er has been!) an orphan. He also worries that he may have besmirched his family
escutcheon by lying to the Pirate-King. He has come, he declares, before the
tombs of his ancestors to implore their pardon. His confession puzzles Frederic,
who reminds the Major-General that he has only recently acquired his baronial
castle. But the Major-General simply claims that, when he bought the estate, he
purchased all that went with it, including the chapel and tombs: “I don’t know
whose ancestors they were, but I know whose ancestors they are” and describes
himself “their descendant by purchase” (125). Frederic accepts this explanation
without demurral. His beloved Mabel seems more tentative, especially when
we take into consideration her aria, which is no longer included in the score but
which was sung at the English premiere of Pirates in Paignton. Her observations
about hypothetical Stanleys leave no doubt that they are part of family fantasy:
15
The more usual representatives of the law are accorded no better treatment. The law’s
corruption and hypocrisy is a persistent theme in Gilbert from Trial by Jury (1875) onwards.
I will not discredit such

A glorious ancestor
Ancestral hero deathless shade
(If such a shade there be).16
We should, then, be more skeptical than Frederic is about Mabel’s oath, sworn
over her father’s purchased ancestors, of fidelity to him until he is finally free of
his bondage to the pirates: “By all the Stanleys dead and gone, I swear it.”
The strain of social and political satire in Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas runs
deeper than in other European comic opera of the period. It has much of Aris-
tophanes in it. Not only does Gilbert place Aristophanes on the curriculum of
his women’s university, but the rival choruses of men and women in Princess
Ida, Pirates of Penzance, Patience, and Iolanthe (1882) recall those of Aristo-
phanes’ Lysistrata (411 BC). Gilbert is one of the few dramatists since the fifth
century BC who gives the chorus so dominant a role in opera. Further, Gilbert’s
Major-General gave to know, among other things, the “croaking chorus from the
Frogs [405 BC] of Aristophanes,” even if he knows nothing of modern military
weapons and strategy (121). Similarly, the Fairy Queen in Iolanthe knows of
“the amorous dove, type of Ovidius Naso,” (194–95) and the theatrical director
Ludwig in Grand Duke carries out a coup d’état to establish a régime like that of
ancient Athens in his homeland (439–40).
The element of social satire is less evident in the scores as published today
than in the opening night libretti. For Richard D’Oyly Carte and Arthur Sul-
livan were less ready than Gilbert to irritate bourgeois and aristocratic audi-
ences with attacks that might seem too savage in sensitive areas. Since Sullivan
often finished the music late, Gilbert’s satire was sometimes not noticed until
the performances were actually staged and the reviews out; Gilbert slipped in a
lot that was cut, when detected, from subsequent performances. Reginald Allen
observes of the Grand Duke:
the second line of the Chorus of Chamberlains, “The good Grand Duke
of Pfennig Halbpfennig / Though he may be of German Royalty a sprig”
was bowdlerized to: “Though, in his own opinion, very very big.” There
were many “sprigs” of German royalty very, very close to the British royal
family. How Sullivan must have squirmed at these satirical sallies.” (Allen
1975a: 172 #89b)
Allen understates the matter. Queen Victoria was herself German by birth, as
was her late consort, Prince Albert. While Sullivan was always eager to cultivate
royalty, Gilbert was not. Unsurprisingly, Gilbert was not knighted until after
Victoria’s death.
16
The text of the aria is in The Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan (Bradley142). It is neither
included nor mentioned in The First Night Gilbert and Sullivan (Allen 1975b).
288 Partial Answers
While Gilbert was freer than Juvenal to pass judgment on the political fig-
ures of his day, he had less latitude in this regard than Aristophanes once had. He
could and did satirize the flaws of upper- and middle-class society. The House
of Lords was fair game, as we see not only in Iolanthe but also in Pirates of
Penzance.
The social status of characters, however, can change in a flash in Gilbert’s
world on the unsupported testimony of those who claim they looked after them
as children. In H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), Buttercup (a bumboat woman) says she
mixed up two small children when, in her youth, she practiced “baby farming.”
One was the captain of the Pinafore, Josephine’s father, the other Josephine’s
beloved Ralph, a common sailor. Sir Joseph, commander of the navy, sums ev-
erything up after Buttercup’s “disclosure”: Ralph is now the captain and the
captain is Ralph. The captain’s daughter, then, marries the present captain who
is the same age as the former captain who now marries his nursemaid Buttercup.
Sir Joseph, who had designs on the similarly named Josephine, marries Hebe,
one of his chorus of sisters, cousins, and aunts.
D’Oyly Carte carefully labeled Cousin Hebe in the program, though the li-
bretto doesn’t note precisely what Hebe’s relationship to Sir Joseph is. She does,
however, tell him to say “goodbye to his sisters and his cousins and his aunts,
especially his cousins whom he reckons up by dozens, and his aunts” (98). She is
less insistent on his breaking away from sisters. Similarly, in Gondoliers (1889),
Inez, a nurse, “reveals” that the real king of Barataria is not one of two Venetian
gondoliers, as originally thought, but her own son Luis (374-75). Nobility and
lowly status are inverted with a few words delivered to credulous ears. There
were precedents for such actions in Roman New Comedy. But the precedents for
such actions in New Comedy are in tragedy, most notably in Sophocles’ Oedipus
and Euripides’ Ion.
Scholars have tried to enforce, since the renaissance, a much stricter line
between the serious and the humorous than did the ancients, imposing our notion
of tragedy as “sorrow play” on a Greek term that does not necessarily indicate
sorrow at all. Greek tragedies are often dryly humorous, as is the final episode
of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, or broadly funny as Euripides’ Helen is throughout.
Gilbert’s first-night often had strongly serious elements, especially when it came
to descriptions of the poor and genuinely oppressed; and he was forced to make
his most drastic cuts in references to the plight of the poor. In an era and coun-
try fearful of revolution, statements that might arouse popular feelings of anger
worried the élite.
Although there is much in Gilbert that suggests the comedy of manners and
little that represents overtly the horror of life in the lower strata of Victorian
society, Gilbert gives us glimpses of that Dickensian world. The best-known
instance is Josephine’s aria in the second act of H.M.S Pinafore contrasting the
affluent world to which she belongs because (so she thinks) of her father’s posi-
tion with the poverty of the world to which the man she loves belongs:
a dark, dingy room

In some back street, with stuffy children crying,
Where organs yell, and clacking housewives fume,
And clothes are hanging out all day a-drying.
With one cracked looking glass to see your face in,
And dinner served up in a pudding basin. (92–93)
Gilbert’s rhyme between “face in” and “basin” lightens the picture’s grimness,
as does Sullivan’s melodramatic musical setting.
But Sullivan did not take the edge off Strephon’s song in Iolanthe where we
see Gilbert’s passion for Dickens in his reference to Fagin from Oliver Twist:
Fold your flapping wings,
Soaring Legislature!
Stoop to little things —
Stoop to Human Nature!
Never need to roam,
Members patriotic,
Let’s begin at home —
Crime is no exotic!
Bitter is your bane —
Terrible your trials —
Dingy Drury Lane!
Soapless Seven Dials!
Take a tipsy lout
Gathered from the gutter —
Hustle him about —
Strap him to a shutter:
What am I but he,
Washed at hours stated —
Fed on filagree —
Clothed and educated?
He’s a mark of scorn —
I might be another,
If I had been born
Of a tipsy mother!
Take a wretched thief
Through the city sneaking,
Pocket handkerchief
Ever, ever seeking:
What is he but I
Robbed of all my chances —
Picking pockets by
290 Partial Answers
Force of circumstances?
I might be as bad —
As unlucky, rather —
If I’d only had
Fagin for a father! (198–99)
This aria was excised from the currently performed score for reasons that are not
quite clear. Only one reviewer, Beatty Kingston, writing in The Theatre (Janu-
ary 1, 1883), took particular exception to this number, which he called a “song”
rather than an aria, on the grounds that it was too serious: “The libretto of Io-
lanthe has been used by its author as the vehicle for conveying to society at
large a feeling of protest on behalf of the indigent, and a scathing satire upon the
hereditary moiety of our Legislature” (cited in Cited by Allen 1975b: 175–76).
The opera (and Strephon’s role) is lessened by the cut.
Strephon’s song may have seemed too much akin to the spirit of The Wicked
World (1873), Gilbert’s earlier theatrical attempt to use the theme of fairies and
their contacts with humans as a vehicle for social and political comment (see
Goldberg 466; see Hargreaves). This play, based on his own earlier satire of the
same name, was, like Iolanthe (1882), a story of fairies and mortals. But Gilbert
was unable to get it scored until 1909 — well after Sullivan’s death. Iolanthe,
a milder version of the fairy theme, was the closest Gilbert came to the moral
satire of The Wicked World while still securing Sullivan’s cooperation.
Negative critical reaction to Princess Zara’s speech concluding Act 2 of Uto-
pia Limited caused the following Strephon-like words of hers to be excised: “in-
experienced civilians will govern your Army and your Navy; no social reform
will be attempted, because out of vice, squalor, and drunkenness no political
capital is to be made” (412; also 413 for Allen’s comment). Gilbert succumbed
to pressure and cut the offending political and social statements after the opening
night. He had, after all, already satirized appointment of “inexperienced civil-
ians” to military command through his Sir Joseph in Pinafore, based, despite
Gilbert’s denials, on W. H. Smith, the bookseller appointed to the Admiralty.
And even without Zara’s last words, Utopia Limited remains Gilbert and Sul-
livan’s fiercest satire on English imperial capitalism. It still had both Mr. Gold-
bury’s song, “Some Seven Men Form an Association” (401), the best satirical
summary of capitalist corporate finance ever set to music, and the native king’s
response: “at first it strikes us as dishonest” (402).
Gilbert was more willing to be forthright in social criticism than in sexual
reference. The social criticism is overt and heartfelt: Gilbert clearly wanted his
audiences to understand his point. His sexual allusion is covert and works better
as such, for it may be funnier precisely because the intentionality of its utterance
cannot be proved. It is a secret communication between the writer and those who
“get it.” Overt obscenity is rarely either witty or funny.
Gilbert publicly claimed his opposition to overt sexuality on stage and to
plays he regarded as socialist or propagandistic. He argued to a parliamentary
enquiry that he was unhappy about the lapse of censorship and the use of the
stage as a “pulpit” for political propaganda: “I think that the stage of a theatre is
not a proper pulpit from which to disseminate doctrines possibly of anarchism,
socialism and agnosticism. It is not the proper platform upon which to discuss
questions of adultery and free love before a mixed audience” (Baily 110). He
does not say, however, that the stage is not a good place to satirize any or all the
above, as he does, for example, through the person of Alexis in The Sorceror.
Although his Phantis in Utopia Limited makes fun of the Lord Chamberlain who
“has declined to license any play that is not in blank verse and three hundred
years old” (406), he appears to have wanted, to paraphrase his Ludwig in Grand
Duke, to have a worthy gentleman, the Licenser of Plays, to shock. He knew he
had to compromise with sponsors, the public, and the law.17 He had, as many do,
a sense that some limits and restraints are necessary in the interests of the theater,
even though he himself, when he wrote and directed, pushed vigorously at those
restraints. The poet, like the dancer, needs limits to push against.
Perhaps the best way to come to terms with the paradox of Gilbert’s ap-
parently conventional Victorian personal life, his risqué situations, and his po-
litically inflammatory turns of phrase is to see him as akin to his own King
Paramount in Utopia Limited. Paramount is compelled by the wise men, Scaphio
and Phantis, who control his actions, to contribute libelous accusations about
himself in the society paper, The Palace Peeper, and to write “a grossly per-
sonal Comic Opera, in which he is held up, nightly, to the scorn and contempt
of overwhelming thousands.” “The essence of the joke,” the king explains to his
daughter Zara, “lies in the fact that instead of being the abominable profligate
they suggest, I’m one of the most fastidiously respectable persons in my whole
dominion!” (398). He loves Lady Sophy because she is a prudish paragon. Yet it
would be a mistake — and Paramount would be offended — if we decided that,
because he was enamored of prudishness and propriety, he took no delight in the
scandalous things he wrote about himself. In fact, he is hurt when his daughter
denounces the insulting innuendoes in The Palace Peeper as “mere ungrammati-
cal twaddle” (398). He is torn between anguish at the outrageous things he must
say about himself and pride in saying them well: “Oh, it’s not ungrammatical.
I can’t allow that. Unpleasantly personal, perhaps, but written with an epigram-
matical point that is very rare nowadays — very rare indeed” (ibid).
Gilbert’s libretti thrive on the very words, definitions, and laws that he sub-
verts with puns, ambiguity, and satire. He is, of necessity, constrained by the
social conventions he struggles against, as all artists are. But we must take care
not to cast him as a spokesman for, and caricature of, the very things he was
criticizing. The same care should be taken with his classical predecessors, such
as Virgil, who were under some similar, but heavier, constraints.
17
This complex subject I discuss in detail elsewhere: see Ahl 1988, 1984a, and 1984b.
292 Partial Answers
4. Reading Virgil as Propaganda

As W. S. Gilbert was transformed by his contemporaries into a symbol of prud-
ishness through literalist, or what I call dissociative, readings, so Virgil, by the
same approach, was construed as a supporter of religious, philosophical, and po-
litical ideals he probably did not hold, treated ambiguously, or actually satirized.
No ancient Greek or Latin poet was treated with greater solemnity than Virgil
was by the Victorians and their successors in the early twentieth century. His
Aeneid became the poetic cornerstone in their construction of Classical Rome.
Scholars were particularly insistent about what they thought the Aeneid was for:
to praise Aeneas, Augustus, and Rome. In so insisting, they set the limits and
range of permissible meaning for schoolchildren in advance of their first contact
with the text itself.
Works of literature, like writers, sometimes survive periods of enforced in-
tellectual conformity by skilful camouflage. Virgil’s epic endured as a set book
for two millennia in Christian educational institutions precisely because scholars
found ways of construing it that minimized the intellectual discontinuity be-
tween Virgil’s pagan pluralism and Christian monotheism. Virgil did not live in
or write for a faith-based culture in a society dominated by a single, though mul-
tiply fractured, convention of monotheism. But one would hardly know this in
most assessments of the Aeneid. From at least the time of Dante, Virgil had been
given a place within the establishment of Christian education. Simplified, dis-
sociative readings of the Aeneid were, in the past, arguably crucial to its survival.
Yet Virgil was, by virtue of his training as an Epicurean, intellectually as
distant as could be from monotheistic determinism. Epicurus’ teachings held that
the universe is governed by chance and free will, not by gods and fate. Virgil
and his ancient audiences were, in short, under no constraint, as were his Victo-
rian and Edwardian scholarly expositors, to think like monotheists. When after
mentioning Juno’s persecution of Aeneas in the epic’s opening lines Virgil asks
his reader, “Anger so great: can it really reside in the spirits of heaven?” (Aeneid
1.11), he is not posing an inert rhetorical question. Epicureans in his audience
would have answered “No! The gods are not concerned with human affairs.”
Stoics and Platonists would also have answered negatively, but for different rea-
sons. We should, therefore, proceed cautiously when we examine Virgil’s use of
the traditional literary gods.
Has Virgil jettisoned Epicureanism when his Jupiter tells Venus he has given
Rome empire without end (1.254–56 and 279)? Jupiter’s words look, at first,
like a prophecy of a god who controls the future. But the broader context casts
doubt. Venus has sought Jupiter’s help after a storm unleashed at the instigation
of Jupiter’s wife Juno, drives Venus’ son Aeneas from the high seas onto the Af-
rican coast. Aeneas might have been killed had not Neptune intervened to stop
the storm. Neptune, annoyed at the winds’ intrusion on his personal domain, the
sea, saves Aeneas in the course of restoring calm. He does not intervene for the
purpose of saving him.
Virgil compares Neptune, as he disperses the winds, to a pious human quell-

ing civil strife (1.142–56): aptly so, for the storm he quells results from the
breakdown of a system of checks and balances that, Virgil tells us, Jupiter set
in place to prevent precisely such an incident. Aeolus, given command of the
winds by Jupiter, knows, Virgil tells us, how to release or check them in ac-
cordance with fixed terms Jupiter has established. Aeolus ignores these terms
when Juno bribes him to unleash the winds (1.52–83). Jupiter fails not only to
prevent Aeolus from taking this action (or to punish him afterwards) but even to
observe that Aeolus has violated his contract. There is, therefore, an irony when
Jupiter smiles at the protesting Venus with “that smile with which he calms sky
and storms” (1.254–56). Perhaps, on other occasions, his smile does calm the
seas. Here it does not.
Scholars see Virgil’s comparison of Neptune to a pious man restoring order
in a state troubled by civil strife as a reference to Octavian (Augustus) who had
brought Rome’s civil wars to an end in 31 BC. They are probably right. But the
simile also reminds us that Octavian seized power after Rome’s traditional gov-
ernment had been smashed by the rivalry of ambitious generals and politicians.
More curiously, Neptune was not among Octavian’s favorite gods during those
civil wars. He was, rather, the divine champion invoked by his main rival Sextus
Pompey. On one occasion, Suetonius tells us, Octavian had Neptune’s statue
thrown out of a procession, declaring: “I will win this war whether Neptune
wills it or not” (16).
The context then, has complex cross-currents. Yet scholars continue to cite
Jupiter’s declaration of Roman destiny in dissociated isolation, as if it were Vir-
gil’s authorial declaration rather than a statement he attributes to one of his often
unpredictable characters. We make Jupiter’s promise of eternal power more de-
finitive by ignoring the context in which it is made and the doubts that context
casts on Jupiter’s reliability. In doing so, we edit Virgil as Dawe edits Sophocles.
Virgil’s association with and support for the ideology of empire seemed crucial
to many in an era when our predecessors wanted students trained in the habits
of empire.18 The Portuguese and Spanish New Worlds had produced their own
imperial epics earlier, notably the brilliant, and sometimes impishly irreverent
Os Lusíadas (1572) by Luís de Camõens, who knew the Aeneid intimately, and
Ubertino Carrara’s Latin Columbus (1715), resonant of all the great Latin epi-
cists from Virgil to Silius and beyond, and ending with an unequivocal celebra-
tion of Columbus’ establishment of Spain’s empire in the Caribbean.
The kinds of empire Britain, France, Germany, and the United States were
developing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries demanded ever larger
and more professional military forces, not a few hundred fortune-seekers such
18
Perhaps the most extreme instance of the pressure brought to bear on schools and
young people by writers of the day is Newbolt 1917.
294 Partial Answers
as those who helped Cortés launch his unauthorized conquest of Mexico. Tens
of thousands of fighting men were needed, especially for conflicts when imperial
powers collided, as they did in the First World War. Recruits could be won in the
schoolroom.19 Young minds could be filled with dreams of travel to far off coun-
tries, individual heroism, conquest, and selfless service to nation and God. The
extent to which such educational propaganda was successful can be measured in
the huge number of volunteers for Kitchener’s army for the First World War in
1914 (see Hynes: 27).
Victorian and Edwardian educators seized upon Virgil’s epic as the principal
ancient text for teaching patriotic imperialism in England, largely because no
other poetic masterpiece could be shaped to that ideological end. The Iliad is
not about empire-building, even though it is commonly read as the glorification
of combat. Iliadic heroes, though formidable in battle, are peevish, mutinous,
and non-patriotic (see Ahl 2011). The Odyssey will not do either. Samuel Butler
(1922) argued that it had too many feminine touches and had to be a woman’s
composition. Besides, Odysseus loses his entire command on the way home
from Troy; his focus is on personal survival. No one has ever cared enough about
the Argonauticas of Apollonius and Valerius to construe them as imperial epics.
And Statius’ Thebaid not only sings of a civil war between the unlovely sons of
unlovely Oedipus that ruined Thebes but also includes Statius’ personal wish
that kings, and only kings, should retell the tale of its impiety. Lucan’s Pharsalia
was the antithesis of everything Victorians wanted taught because of the author’s
proclamation of the eternal incompatibility of monarchy and freedom. For An-
glican patriots Dante was too Italian, too religious, and too Catholic; Milton too
religious and too protestant. Only Virgil was open to construction as a favorable
expression of imperial destiny, though such a construction could be achieved
only by privileging some passages over others.
To make the Aeneid a model for patriotism, Victorians had not only to rep-
resent it as a paean of praise for imperial Rome but to generate a parallel be-
tween the Rome of Augustus and Victorian England. Paul Kennedy observes
that British sea power seemed so immense that “people spoke then and later
of a ‘Pax Britannica’” (149). The Latin phrase was clearly meant to recall the
so-called Pax Augusta following the civil wars in Virgil’s day. The parallel is
shaky, not just because British naval domination was of much shorter duration
than Rome’s, but because Queen Victoria occupied a vastly different position
from that held at Rome by Octavian, Julius Caesar’s posthumously adopted son.
It was not Victoria, but “her” Parliament and Prime Ministers who governed, in
accordance with tradition and law. The queen, though a legitimate monarch, had
far less power than her predecessors. She was the nation’s figurehead, not its
19
See Fussell 155–90; Barlow; and L. R. Robertson.
ruler, a living equivalent of the symbolic Britannia on the reverse of her coins.
Victoria’s subjects were free to love or hate their real elected officials while still
being patriotically loyal to queen and country. There were, of course, those who
wanted to abolish the monarchy or thought of themselves in terms of other na-
tional identities: the Irish, Scots, or Welsh. But supporters of both Gladstone and
Disraeli could swear loyalty to Queen and country without making a partisan
political statement. And Victoria really was her given name.
Octavian, in contrast, had usurped power, conquered the Roman world in
a series of civil wars, assumed a new identity as Augustus, “The August,” and
declared an age of peace and prosperity under his aegis. He, not the senate and
consuls, ruled Rome. To swear loyalty, in the same breath, to “Augustus” and
to Rome was much more problematic than swearing allegiance to Victoria and
England. Executive power lay in different places in Victorian England and Vir-
gil’s Rome. England had always been a monarchy (apart from its two decades
under Cromwell), but on Victoria’s succession, the last vestiges of genuine royal
power were stripped away.
In Virgil’s day, then, traditional loyalty and patriotism were harder to define,
much less maintain, even if one was Roman and not connected to Rome’s sub-
ject populations in Italy such as the Samnites and Etruscans. Five hundred years
of government by publicly elected representatives (res publica) had collapsed
in the chaos of civil wars and had been replaced by the rule of a usurper whose
executive power was as real as Victoria’s was symbolic. Octavian’s official fic-
tion that Rome was still a republic, and that he had restored that republic, was the
opposite of the Victorian ruling-class fiction of an England ruled by a monarch.
In setting loyalty to Augustus on a par with loyalty to Victoria, scholars created
a model that construed Virgil and his contemporary poet-friends as loyal to the
fictions of Rome created by the victorious (and often murderous) Octavian.
Francesco Sforza was the first scholar to contend, in a bold but not well
argued 1935 article published in the heyday of fascism, that the Aeneid was an
attack on Octavian and imperialism. But poets and novelists had begun drifting
to that conclusion as imperial dreams died in the trenches of the First World
War. For the first time in history, losers of a particular battle on a particular day
suffered more casualties than the record established over two millennia earlier
when Hannibal defeated the Romans at Cannae in 216 BC.20 After 1917, when
propagandists and recruiting officers sought some new model of heroism to sub-
stitute for the now hopeless image of the valiant infantryman, they settled on air-
men, pilots who zoomed in and out of individual combat like Homeric warriors
in chariots and who had a code of honor and decency (see Robertson 155–93).
Henri Bordeaux represents the French Ace Georges Guynemer as a modern ver-
20
“The scale of the losses at Cannae was unrivalled until the industrialised slaughter of
the First World War” (Goldsworthy 13).
296 Partial Answers
sion of the medieval hero Roland; last of the knights errant, first of the new
knights of the air (Robertson, 188).21
Some important poets construed their war experiences in terms of their
schoolboy reading of the Aeneid. Siegfried Sassoon, a British infantry officer,
writes, in a poem entitled “Arms and the Man,” about a visit to Colonel Saw-
bones:
He eyed a neat-framed notice there
Above the fireplace hung to show
Disabled heroes where to go
For arms and legs; with scale of price,
And words of dignified advice
How officers could get them free.
Elbow or shoulder, hip or knee,
Two arms, two legs, though all were lost,
They’d be restored him free of cost (1918: 46)
The title suggests that, Sassoon, like many others, had taken the Aeneid to sym-
bolize the national dreams of empire and patriotic conquest that had brought
misery upon Europe and upon him personally: he was translating the epic’s
opening words into English and transposing them, with dark humour, into a dif-
ferent register and environment. No one was yet prepared to read Virgil himself
this way, even though he too plays many ironic variations on his own phrase
arma virumque, “Arms and the Man”: for example, we find arma virum, in the
sense of “arms of men,” floating alongside swimmers after the storm in Aeneid
1.119, and Dido ordering the arma viri, “the arms of the man” placed on the pyre
next to the effigy of Aeneas so she can cremate them along with the other items
he has sloughed off (exuvias) in 4. 495–96 as a symbol of her own love, disil-
lusionment, and desire for both vengeance and companionship in death.
For Sassoon, the romance and chivalry of epic battle was gone. He claimed
he had said “good-bye to Galahad” when he went back to England on sick leave,
that he was no more a “knight of dreams and show,” but was now gladdened
only by “lustless and senseless hatred” (1916: 199).22 Virgil’s Aeneas has already
abandoned dreams of equestrian gallantry before the Aeneid begins. He is always
an infantryman in combat. He never fights either from a chariot in Homeric style
21
The English translation of Bordeaux’s work has an introduction by Theodore Roos-
evelt, a champion (and exemplar) of the (imaginary) old model of heroic behavior.
22
See also Hynes 27 and Robertson 161–62. Such negative reactions among armed
services writers worried advocates of patriotic imperialism even after the First World War
ended, despite their avowals to the contrary. Henry Newbolt says he does not think Wilfred
Owen’s “shell-shocked war poems will move our grandchildren much” (Margaret Newbolt
314–15; see also Hynes 304; Robertson 166–67).
or as a knight on horseback in the Italian style in the Aeneid, although he had

been a famous charioteer in the Iliad. But he lost a fine rig and team while being
rescued from Diomedes in Iliad 5 (see Ahl 2007: 335; 425–26). And Diomedes
used Aeneas’ rig to win the chariot race in Iliad 23. At the funeral games for his
own father in Aeneid 5, Aeneas understandably substitutes a boat race for the
traditional funerary chariot race. Virgil’s Aeneas expresses cynicism throughout
the Aeneid as Sasoon does after his return to England. And Aeneas’ final act is
one of hatred: killing his rival Turnus, who crouches at his knees, hoping for
mercy and begging him to extend his hatred no further (Aeneid 12.938–52).
During recent years many new studies have explored the idea, first sketched
by Sforza and developed more fully by Putnam (1988), that Virgil was an op-
ponent, rather than a supporter of the August Octavian’s new imperial régime.
Craig Kallendorf (2007), surveying these newer readings, terms them “pessi-
mistic,” thereby suggesting they are somehow less pleasing than the canonical
pro-Roman and pro-Imperial (and thus, presumably, “optimistic”) readings, and
that the “optimistic” readings still constitute the orthodoxy. It is not surprising,
however, that some cracks have appeared in the defenses of the traditional “op-
timistic” reading, since there remains only a vague cultural recollection as to
why it mattered to anyone in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries whether the
Aeneid were praise for Aeneas, Augustus, and Rome or not.
Even prosaic propagandists, after all, can praise a mythic hero, his ruler, and
his fatherland. If the Aeneid is a poetic masterpiece, its political “spin” cannot be
the essential quality of its greatness. The problem is that our cultural sense of the
Aeneid’s greatness remains more dependent on the purpose for which we declare
it was written than on its particular intellectual or literary qualities. Young read-
ers are still given a prescribed ideological framework and expected to construe
the Aeneid in terms of that framework. The poet’s alleged intent is the basis for
a spurious dialectic in which the questions asked and the answers elicited are
dictated by non-negotiable conventions of meaning. Teachers train students to
supply model answers for model questions about Virgil because the answers ex-
aminers expect are as predictable as the questions they ask. And students worry
they might be asking questions they are not supposed to ask.23 Under such cir-
cumstances they are no more “reading” the Aeneid than Gilbert’s students are
reading Aristophanes once his text has been bowdlerized.
Collective experience warns students that they are better advised to mem-
orize official explanations and reproduce them on demand. Deryck Williams’
notes to accompany C. Day Lewis’ translation of the Aeneid (1985; see also
Williams 2009) thus fill a particular need for those who “in Classics would suc-
ceed.” Although the notes simplify intellectual issues and are sparse in literary
23
The most overt statement of this priestly notion is E. R. Dodds’ warning (1966: 37–49).
that we should not ask questions the writer “did not intend us to ask.”
298 Partial Answers
and historical detail, they are categorical in their insistence on Virgil’s authorial
intent and will certainly help those facing exams say what they need to say.
I could not prevent my own translation of the Aeneid (Ahl 2007) from being
marketed in “optimistic” terms in the blurb on its dust jacket: “Virgil’s supreme
achievement,” it declares, “is not only to reveal Rome’s future for his imperial
patron Augustus, but to invest it with both passion and suffering for all those
caught up in the fates of others.”
I cannot discuss the last part of the blurb, because its meaning eludes me.
As to the first part, the Roman future: the only two people Virgil actually names
in the Aeneid who are still alive at the time of writing are the emperor himself
and the emperor’s factotum Agrippa. What scholars call the parade of Rome’s
future in Aeneid 6 does not look at or speculate beyond 23 BC and ends with a
remembrance of the death and funeral that year of Augustus’ chosen successor:
young Marcellus is lamented as if already dead while he is but a soul marching
through Elysium on his way to be born. Virgil’s commentary on the parade of
unborn souls is given by the ghost of the recently dead Anchises, who censors
(in both the ancient and modern sense) the list of “future” Romans by omitting
many figures of huge political importance, such as Marius, Sulla, and Cinna. It
is rather as if one wrote a history of modern Russia and left out Lenin, Stalin,
and Khruschev.
At the same time there is a droll undertow. 23 BC was when Augustus tried
to revive the moribund office of censor only to cancel it permanently part way
through the year for some technical reason and appoint his aide Agrippa to com-
plete the census. Under Roman religious rules a census was invalidated if the
presiding censor looked upon a dead body during his period in office (see Ahl
2007: 373). And Virgil’s census, about half way through his epic, is an expur-
gated count, in the world of the dead, by one of the dead, of the as yet unborn
heroes of Rome’s future, all but one of whom has already lived and died as Virgil
writes. Only the emperor survives to contemplate this non-future, with the image
of his own dead heir before his eyes.
Sophocles, Virgil, and W. S. Gilbert look very different when read associa-
tively rather than dissociatively and when we do not attempt to trim them to fit
our pre-cast moulds. The same holds true of many more writers as different from
one another as Homer, Pushkin, Dumas, and Sir Walter Scott. This could be good
news for fans of W. S. Gilbert, who have always known that Gilbert ranks among
the world’s great dramatists and poets and that he thrives outside (and despite the
indifference of) academia. But associative reading is already fiercely resisted in
traditional scholarly circles and will not be welcomed by the new hierarchies of
modern education. Only a handful of Lady Psyche’s girls now strive to succeed
in Classics, much less to understand specific ancient writers. And modern Lady
Psyches generally do not know the authors whom Gilbert’s Director of Studies
names. Even the interpretations from imperial propaganda’s heyday, cropped
and edited for content, are too detailed for modern curricula: Sophocles and Vir-
gil, in appropriately adjusted (often “dumbed-down”) translations, get, at best, a

week or so in courses on Tragedy, Greco-Roman Civilization, and World Litera-
ture. They have been re-classified, along with all literature up to and including
Théophile Gautier, as “Pre-Modern”: Critical Theory’s unmanaged rest-home
category for literature whose existence it cannot deny, which it does not want,
but which refuses to die.
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Imagining a New World: Henriette Frölich’s Virginia oder die Kolonie von
Kentucky (1820)
Stephanie M. Hilger
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The reception history of Henriette Frölich’s novel Virginia oder die Kolonie
von Kentucky demonstrates that a literary text’s afterlife can be as intriguing as
its contemporary reception. Following its original publication under the pseud-
onym Jerta in Berlin in 1820, Virginia fell into obscurity and was only repub-
lished in 1963. This long period of neglect is not surprising in cases of German
women authors of this period. What is more remarkable is that Frölich’s novel
was recovered not in the then nascent field of feminist literary studies but in the
context of socialist literature. Gerhard Steiner, editor of the 1963 edition pub-
lished by Aufbau-Verlag (Berlin) in the former German Democratic Republic,
characterizes the North American colony described in the novel as a “utopian-
socialist republic” (“utopisch-sozialistische Republik, 1963: 224) and argues
that the author “stands on the side of the poor farmers and those who do not own
land, who lived a miserable life in a fertile landscape” (“tritt . . . in ihrem Roman
auf die Seite der armen Bauern und Landlosen, die in einer fruchtbaren Land-
Partial Answers 10/2: 301–318 © 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Making Poets Serve The Established Order - Editing For Content in Sophocles, Virgil, and Gilbert - Frederick Ahl

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Making Poets Serve the Established Order: Editing for

Content in Sophocles, Virgil, and W. S. Gilbert

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

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Making Poets Serve the Established Order: Editing for Content in

Although Gilbert is more daring than most of his English contemporaries, he

2. Tailoring Oedipus to Freud

the spun threads by which we hang.

mis-translations but a deliberate re-shaping of the text. Like Freud, translators

Fagles’ modification, in fact, suggests that the stranger is an official messenger

Answer: In tiefer Waldschlucht am Kithairon fand ich dich.

3. Polyphonic, “Associative” Texts: Censoring Gilbert

I will not discredit such

a dark, dingy room

4. Reading Virgil as Propaganda

Virgil compares Neptune, as he disperses the winds, to a pious human quell-

or as a knight on horseback in the Italian style in the Aeneid, although he had

gil, in appropriately adjusted (often “dumbed-down”) translations, get, at best, a

Sophocles. 1868. Sophokles. Trans. J. C. C. Donner. Leipzig/Heidelberg: C. F. Winter.

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